Making Programs Faster

`perldoc`

perldoc is mostly just a wrapper around pod2man
It locates files and invokes pod2man and nroff as necessary
Let's find out how to run pod2man:

     % strace -s10000 -f -o perldoc.trace perldoc perlfunc > /dev/null

This generates a list of every system call run by perldoc
- In particular, it will tell us what commands perldoc ran

     % grep execve perldoc.trace
     21892 execve("/usr/local/bin/perldoc", ["perldoc", "perlfunc"], ...
     21893 execve("/bin/sh", ["sh", "-c", 
        "/usr/local/bin/pod2man --lax /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0/pod/perlfunc.pod | nroff -man"], ...
     21894 execve("/usr/local/bin/pod2man", 
        ["/usr/local/bin/pod2man", "--lax", 
         "/usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0/pod/perlfunc.pod"], ...
     21895 execve("/usr/bin/nroff", ["nroff", "-man"], ...

Now let's run pod2man the same way:

      %  time /usr/local/bin/pod2man --lax 
           /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.8.0/pod/perlfunc.pod > /dev/null

      real    0m18.158s
      user    0m17.670s
      sys     0m0.080s

Yup
- Probably a lot of the rest is in nroff
- Presumably we're not prepared to do anything about nroff